Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
I wrote fiction for 17 years before I found out I was a fantasy novelist. Up till then I always thought I was going to write literary fiction, like Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith or Jhumpa Lahiri. But I thought wrong.
The mistake, as a lot of mistakes do, had its origins in my childhood. I grew up in a very literary household. My mother was a novelist. My father wrote poetry; in fact he won a MacArthur "genius" fellowship for it. They were both English professors. Like most people, I read a lot of fantasy as a child — "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was the first novel I ever got good and lost in. But I think there was an understanding that I would eventually move on.
Which for a while it looked like I was doing. I got a fancy education (Harvard) and then a fancier one (Yale). But I always led a double life as a reader. By day, the giants of the Western canon — Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Hemingway, Faulkner — and fantasy by deepest, darkest, starriest night: Lewis, Tolkien, White, Leiber, Le Guin, McCaffrey, Cooper, Moorcock, Zelazny, Pullman.
I published two novels, the literary kind, one in 1998 and another in 2004, but even then I knew they were missing something. They had a chilly quality. The writing came slow and hard. There was something inside me that just wasn't making it onto the page. I hadn't found my voice yet. I was starting to wonder if I even had one.
But while I was busy with literary fiction, fantasy had been busy too. When I was a kid, fantasy felt like a marginal thing, a subculture, but now it was everywhere: the "Harry Potter" books, the "Lord of the Rings" movies, the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, "Eragon," "Twilight," and on and on. People craved it. We — as a whole, as a culture — seemed to be getting more interested in the kinds of questions fantasy deals with: questions about history, and about our connection to the natural world, and about power, how to find it in yourself, how to master it, what to do with it.
Fantasy wasn't just growing, it was changing, too. People — authors like Neil Gaiman and George R. R. Martin and Kelly Link and Susanna Clarke and Joe Abercrombie — were complicating it, and subverting it, and expanding it, making it stranger and darker and subtler and realer. When Martin wrote about a dwarf, he didn't write about a gruff, sturdy, bearded axeman like Tolkien's Gimli, he wrote about an actual person with actual dwarfism. They were going beyond the time-honored tropes of good-vs.-ultimate-evil, and I'm-an-orphan-but-my-parents-were-secretly-royal/magic/divine. Not that there's anything wrong with those tropes, but these people were doing things with fantasy that I had no idea fantasy could do.
I was starting to realize what on some level I must have known all along: Fantasy was offering me something I needed, something I couldn't get anywhere else, not even from literary fiction. That's when I stopped reading fantasy and started writing it.
It began almost as a thought experiment: I wanted to write a story like "Harry Potter," or "The Chronicles of Narnia," or "The Golden Compass," a story about someone who discovers power he didn't know he had, and who finds his way into a secret world. But as much as I loved Harry, and felt deeply connected to him, I was also painfully conscious of how different my life was from his. I was in my 30s and dealing with different problems from Harry's. I wondered if there was a way to make my magician's life look more like my own.
So I made my magician older. I made him American — he doesn't talk in the crisp, correct manner of English fantasy heroes. I gave him a drinking habit, a mood disorder, a sex life. I wasn't going to give my magician a Dumbledore or a Gandalf. There would be no avuncular advisor to show him where the path was. I wanted my magician to feel as lost as I did.
The first time I wrote a sentence about a person casting a spell, it was like I heard distant alarms going off. I felt like there must be a control room somewhere with a bunch of people sitting wearing headsets and looking at a red dot blinking on a map, and the dot was me, and the people were saying, He's breaking the rules! We can't let him get away with this! I was writing against my education and my upbringing. I was writing against reality itself — I was breaking rules, and not just the literary kind but the thermodynamic kind, too. It felt forbidden. It felt good.
Better than good: it was the most profound, intense writing experience I'd ever had. The icy grip of reality on my fiction cracked, and a torrent of magic came rushing out. The thing about life in the real world is, all your hopes and dreams and desires and feelings are trapped inside you. Reality doesn't care — it's stiffly, primly indifferent to your inner life. But in a fantasy world, all those feelings can come out. When you cast a spell, you use your desires and emotions to change reality. You reshape the outer world to look more like your inner world. You have demons in your subconscious? In a fantasy world those demons can get out, where you can grapple with them face to face. The story I was telling was impossible, and I believed in it more than I believed in the 10,000 entirely reasonable, plausible things I'd written before.
Fantasy is sometimes dismissed as childish, or escapist, but I take what I am doing very, very seriously. For me fantasy isn't about escaping from reality, it's about re-encountering the challenges of the real world, but externalized and transformed. It's an emotionally raw genre — it forces you to lay yourself open on the page. It doesn't traffic in ironies and caveats. When you cast a spell you can't be kidding, you have to mean it. I felt myself connecting with a much older literary tradition, one that went further back, before Joyce and Woolf and Hemingway, back before the modern novel in English was even born, before literature became so closely identified with realism. Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Homer: those writers trafficked in witches and fairies and ghosts and monsters. Why shouldn't I?
I was conscious that I was giving things up, too. There's a certain kind of respect that fantasy simply doesn't get. If I was ever going to win a Pulitzer for my fiction — which admittedly was pretty doubtful — I wasn't going to do it writing fantasy. But writing about magic felt like magic. It was as if all my life I'd been writing in a foreign language that I wasn't quite fluent in, and now I'd found my mother tongue. It turned out I did have a voice after all. I'd had it all along. I just wasn't looking for it in the right place.
Lev Grossman is the author of the "Magicians" trilogy, including most recently, "The Magician's Land." He is also the book critic for Time magazine.
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